


Lovely Bitter Water

by Pierulestheworld



Series: Future Young Justice [1]
Category: Aquaman (Comics), DCU, DCU (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, Pre-Reboot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:47:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26040625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pierulestheworld/pseuds/Pierulestheworld
Summary: Dolphin is cut off from Atlantis and has no idea where she is or if anyone will find her, but she'll survive.
Relationships: Dolphin/Garth (DCU)
Series: Future Young Justice [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/809928
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4





	Lovely Bitter Water

**Author's Note:**

> So this was written almost 2 years ago lol I am not good at remembering to post fics
> 
> Title comes from Bitter Water by The Oh Hellos! Sorry if there's any bits that are weird. I uhhh completely changed the tense it's written in last night when editing.
> 
> Anyways, this is for my Future Young Justice AU. tldr; I didn't like dc killing their kid characters so I came up with ways to save them. This is how Cerdian (and Dolphin bc I love her <3) survived the attack from the Spectre during Infinite Crisis or whatever event that was. Garth is alive bc his death in Blackest Night was bs and it's my AU and I get to decide who lives.

Atlantis is being destroyed. Again.

Dolphin clutches Cerdian close to her chest as she swims as fast from the wreckage as she can. She has no idea where Garth or Arthur or Mera are. She’d settle for having Koryak, Vulko, or even Lorena, but none of them were with her when that giant green man started his attack. Arthur, Mera, and Lorena aren’t even been in Poseidonis, Dolphin thinks.

She is worried for Garth. It seemed like he intended to fight the giant head when he sent her away. She didn’t know how he could fight that, but magic in general baffled her. She hopes her husband is alright. He must be.

She swims through the palace looking for someone she knows when an explosion sends her rocketing through the water into a part of the city she doesn’t go to. Cerdian is crying, and her body aches, and she is trying to calm him down and figure out where an exit is when another series of explosions send her spiraling once more through the water. Dolphin is knocked unconscious, but miraculously, she holds on to Cerdian.

His wailing, and a throbbing pain in her leg, wake her up.

She can tell she’s now outside the city, but the giant green man is still there hammering Poseidonis into rubble. Dolphin looks down and grimaces, but she doesn’t have a choice. So, despite the fact her leg looks to be severely injured, she swims away from Atlantis as fast as she can.

-x-x-x-

Dolphin isn’t sure how long she has been swimming. Her leg is numb and Cerdian is quiet. Atlantis is nowhere in sight. It’s darker than usual, meaning she is most likely in deeper waters. That’s fine. She has spent almost all of the life she can remember in deeper waters. She should be okay so long as no mysterious giant green men try to attack her.

She sits down behind a rock formation and finally checks her leg.

It doesn’t look good. She had occasionally noticed a red trail swirling behind her earlier, but she needed to be focused on swimming, not her leg and how much blood it was losing.

Most of her pants has torn away, leaving her bare leg behind. It’s now a horrible mess of gashes and bruises with not a single bit being its regular skin tone. She can see chunks missing, and some bone has to broken or out of place from the pain that happens when she shifts. Worst of all, it looks like some debris had hit her knee and cut right through it. Her lower leg is only half connected to the rest of her body.

And now that the adrenaline is fading, she is suddenly light-headed….

Dolphin wakes again to Cerdian crying. It takes her a second longer than usual to figure out it is his hungry cry. She has started feeding him seaweed, but she is too tired to look for any. She struggles out of her bodysuit and brings Cerdian to her chest. She lets him feed as she tries to get her head to stop spinning. Her leg must be worse than she thinks, and she had thought it pretty bad.

When Cerdian is done and sleeping, she sets him down in a crook in the rock formation. She needs to decide what to do with her leg. She has no idea how to repair it when it’s hanging away from her knee like that. She could wait, but who knows if Garth or Arthur could find her. Who knows if they are even still alive.

Dolphin nods and, after she makes sure Cerdian is safe and hidden, she goes looking for tools. She tears out the midsection of her body suit, then tears that up again to make bandages. She finds a large rock with a relatively sharp point. Finds another rock to help sharpen it more. She also finds some seaweed to eat later when she will be too in pain to look for some.

She takes a deep breath. Dolphin brings the rock down on her knee and screams.

-x-x-x-

Dolphin isn’t sure how long she and Cerdian have been swimming. It took months for her knee to heal. She started swimming again after that, but somewhere she apparently went in the wrong direction. She hasn’t come across any of the Atlantean cities at any point.

Cerdian has been growing. He’s babbling now and is too big to carry.

If Dolphin were on her own, she would have gone back to how she was before she had met people. But she has to talk to Cerdian. Garth told her once that she was lucky to be able to speak. He said not learning it as a child meant you could never learn it as an adult.

At least, she thinks she didn’t learn it as a child. Maybe she did. Maybe she forgot.

She misses Garth. Dolphin never usually thought about her past, but when she did, she went to him for help. He grew up similarly, alone in the ocean. Though in waters closer to the surface, and he had first met someone at a younger age.

Sometimes, she considers staying in one place. Maybe her always swimming was why she hasn’t been found. But she had spent months in one spot, and no one came. Maybe Garth is dead and that’s why he isn’t looking for her.

She thinks he would. Dolphin knows he loves that Tula more than her. But she hopes he loves her enough to look for her when she is missing. Maybe not.

Sometimes, her thoughts slip. She forgets what Garth looks like. Arthur too. She can feel herself going back to a more animal-like mind without another person’s presence. It would be easy to go back to living in deep waters and forget what society is like. But she has Cerdian. She doesn’t want that for him. It’s lonely.

So, she keeps swimming. She has to come across land or a boat sometime.

But she doesn’t. The ocean is large and deep. She could swim up and look for a boat, but be without food for however long. She could stay near the bottom, but have a lesser chance of finding people.

Dolphin gets used to it being her and Cerdian. He’s old enough to eat fish now. She catches the fish, but he has the teeth to eat them. His hair is also growing out. All inky black around his head with a small shock of white. He is still very small though. Even smaller than he should be, she thinks sadly.

He does not talk much, her little Cerdian. Maybe he gets that from her. Or living alone in such a large landscape makes you silent. But he _could_ talk, and she is happy about that. He won’t be feral like she had been.

He is babbling at her when she sees the orca pack. Orcas are wild cards. The real killers of the sea, not sharks. The orcas are feeding on a recent kill. Dolphin swims away as fast as she can. The orcas will see a lone creature and its calf. They will not be afraid to attack.

And they do. Dolphin swims and swims for hours. Cerdian holds onto her back. She isn’t very fast anymore, not after she cut half of her leg off. The orcas are fast. They could easily catch up. They want to play with their new food first.

Dolphin is so focused on swimming that when she notices the ground is sloping up, she is already seeing shapes in the water above her.

The orcas notice at the same time. They make disappointed noises as Dolphin continues to the shore. They go back to their old food. They don’t want to get beached. No food is worth that.

Dolphin begins to let the hope she refused to feel for _months?years?_ back in. She can find people. She can see Garth and Arthur again. She won’t go back to being lonely.

She doesn’t think things through.

Getting around underwater with half of a leg missing is easy. It doesn’t hurt how well she can swim. It does hurt how well she can walk on land.

She crawls out of the mud next to two fishermen. She stands, then immediately collapses onto them.

“Atlantis,” she manages to get out, before she falls unconscious.

-x-x-x-

_Poseidonis, Atlantis_

_September, 2012_

It was a normal day in Atlantis. Then the communicator from the Justice League lit up.

Arthur pales. “Are you sure?”

On screen, Donna nods. “STAR Labs sent some photo’s over. It’s Dolphin just—” she hesitates. “Well, it’s Dolphin. And Cerdian too. Can’t mistake Garth’s purple eyes for anything else.”

Arthur runs a hand through his hair and shakes his head to clear it. “Alright. Which STAR Labs?”

“The Seattle branch. The fishermen called the police, who noticed the gills and webbed fingers and called STAR. They called us after they matched her to one of their profiles and needed a way to contact Atlantis.”

He nods. “Thank you, Donna. And I’m sure Garth thanks you too.”

She smiles sadly. “Anything for him.”

-x-x-x-

“Garth, keep calm.”

Garth gives Arthur a confused look. “Okay? What bad news do you have then?”

“Not bad news, good news.” Arthur pauses. “Dolphin and Cerdian have been found.”

Garth goes still. “What?”

“Two fishermen in northern Washington state found them and they were brought to the nearest STAR Labs branch.”

Garth continues to stare, before he shoots towards Arthur in a flash of bubbles. He grabs the front of Arthur’s shirt and looks him directly in the eyes. “Are you sure? Are you 100% sure?”

He has no idea what he’s feeling. When Dolphin and Cerdian had first gone missing, he hadn’t been able to use his magic to find them, his fight with The Spectre doing something strange to his powers. It had taken almost a year for his powers to return to normal. He searched whenever he could for his wife and son during that time the normal way, looking in an Atlantean submarine. He hadn’t found any trace of them. Garth continued to look for them over the next two years, both magically and normally, but found nothing.

He had refused to believe they were dead, no matter what others had said. He couldn’t handle the idea, not after losing Tula. He needed to believe that they were alive somehow to stay sane.

And now Arthur is saying they are alive.

Arthur nods. “Donna says it’s them.”

Garth lets him go and seems adrift for a second, before he charges past Arthur to where they keep their transportation. Arthur follows.

-x-x-x-

Garth throws the door open. “ _Where are they_?”

One of the scientists flinches back. “The younger one is through there but—"

Garth ignores him, and practically tears the door off its hinges in the rush to see his son. He stops short when he enters the room, filled with too many emotions he can’t comprehend.

Cerdian looks up to see who’s come in so noisily. He looks so much older than he is in Garth’s memories. No longer a chubby baby, but a small, thin child. He’s wearing surface world clothing, a Superman t-shirt and jean shorts, both probably given to him by the scientists. His hair has grown out, reaching his shoulders now as a mess of black curls with white bangs.

Garth tries not to sob as he rushes forward to hug his son.

Cerdian makes a small noise as Garth pulls him to his chest, and Garth’s heart suddenly stops at the idea that his son doesn’t recognize him. Cerdian squints at him and tilts his head, but doesn’t pull away. He’ll take it. Garth hugs his son to his chest as tightly as he can. He won’t ever let Cerdian out of his sight again.

They sit there like that for a while, Garth rocking Cerdian and taking shuddering breathes. Eventually, Cerdian begins to wiggle.

“Food?” Cerdian asks, looking up at his father with those eyes that match his own.

Garth laughs and wipes a tear away. “In a bit, Cerdian. Let’s go see your mother first.”

Cerdian perks up at that. Garth stands to walk, then bends down to pick Cerdian up. By surface standards, Cerdian is probably too tall or heavy for that, but Garth hasn’t held his son in three years. He isn’t going to let go anytime soon.

Arthur waits for him at the door, a sad expression on his face. “Hello, Cerdian,” he tells the boy who stares back. Arthur turns his attention to Garth. “There’s something you might want to know about Dolphin—”

“Is she alive?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then it’s fine. Show me where she is.”

He brushes past Arthur, then turns to let him lead. Arthur sighs but walks, talking as he goes.

“She’s in a healing tank as she has several cuts on her, and had passed out from exhaustion earlier. They also had to do some intense cleaning on her knee as—” they enter the room she’s held in and Garth inhales sharply. “Her lower left leg is gone, and was taken off poorly. I’m told it’s a miracle there wasn’t any serious infection.”

Dolphin floats in a tank, the slightly green liquid giving her a strange tint. But it’s Dolphin, looking the same as ever. She’s even wearing the remnants of what he remembered her wearing that day when the Spectre attacked. And she is missing half of her left leg.

“Mama! Mama!” Cerdian calls, reaching one hand out.

Garth turns to a scientist. “Do you know when she lost the leg,” he demands, harsher than he intends.

She flinches back slightly, and any other time Garth would feel bad for frightening her. “The wound was healed when she got here and has been healed for quite a while. It likely happened several years ago, I would wager.”

“When Atlantis was attacked, then…” Garth walks forward to get a better look at his wife.

“Mama.” Cerdian touches the glass and frowns. “What’s this?”

Garth hugs his son closer. “Glass. She needs stay in there for a while to get better. We’ll talk to her when she gets out.”

“Sir, Mister, uh, Mister Tempest sir, that’s—”

Garth turns to glare at the scientist, and she visibly shrinks back.

“It’s fine, totally fine, we’ll just leave, bye.”

The scientist hurries out.

Garth drags a chair to the side of the tank, and waits.

-x-x-x-

He uses the time to get to know Cerdian again. His son can talk, and talk as well as any five-year-old, which makes him so proud of both Cerdian and Dolphin. He knows she isn’t the biggest fan of talking. He also almost cries when Cerdian asks who he is. He had been so little when they were separated that he doesn’t even remember his father. But Cerdian doesn’t consider him scary like the occasional scientist that passes through, so Garth focuses on that positive.

Dolphin wakes with a gasp, and Garth jumps out of his chair when he hears it. Cerdian, in the chair next to him, begins to bounce excitedly. They stare at each other through the glass for a second and an eternity, before Dolphin tears off a cord connecting her to the machine and kicks her way to the top. She climbs out and falls haphazardly into his arms.

He’s crying as he holds Dolphin close.

“Thought… you weren’t looking for me.”

Garth shakes his head vigorously. “No. Never. Just couldn’t find you. I’m so sorry.”

She tilts her head up to kiss him deeply. “It’s okay. We’re here now.”


End file.
